The Poet's Novels

What I wrote for

Ten years ago—I need to get this out before 2024 ends so that I can still say this—I published my first novel, Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy. It was published by a small but doughty independent press, and I made a lot mistakes with it, starting with the title (a pretentious allusion to Hegel) and my failure to put some sort of descriptive blurb on the back that might tell readers, y’know, what the book was about. That was symptomatic of my inexperience as a fiction writer, but I also really didn’t know. Only after the book had been out for a while, and it had received its handful of reviews, most of them rather generous, was I able to come up with the following:

Ruth, a bored and frustrated young mother in the Chicago suburbs, is haunted by the letters she receives from her own mother, who has been dead for several years. Ruth hires Lamb, whose investigation traces the letters to Europe and ultimately to Gustave, who tells the story of his equivocal love affair with a beautiful American girl during the student rebellion in Paris in 1968. But this girl is less carefree than she seems; she is an American haunted by her own half-lit memories of the unnarratable horrors of European history, and she may turn out to be Ruth’s mother, if not Ruth’s second self.

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

C’mon, you know you want to read that, right? Right?

It didn’t sell many copies, any more than my poetry books have done. But that’s more or less what I expected. It wasn’t a novel novel; it was a poet’s novel, written in an ecstatic spirit akin to divination, letting the words and sentences accumulate into something immersive. It was a total adventure: characters and settings took shape, but I never really had any idea where the thing was going until I was quite close to the end. I wrote it as a test of fiction, of the novel itself, of what that form might still be capable of in an age captured by images. And I wrote it as a kind of container for my feelings about my long-dead mother, still very much alive in my mind. I hoped for something like what Virginia Woolf described about how writing To the Lighthouse helped her lay to rest her own mother’s restless spirit. It very nearly worked.

Virginia Woolf’s diagram of the structure of To the Lighthouse.

Since that time, I’ve written with more attention to scene, and story. My second novel, though autofictional, has a very deliberate structure, its four sections obliquely modeled on the four Kafka stories that center on his agon with his father. I call it “a shaggy-dog story about grief,” and like the first novel, it tries to contain and organize my complicated feelings about my late dad. The science-fiction novels I have in the works—including Concord, which I plan to start posting next month—have actual plots and made-up characters who do not directly resemble me or any of my family members. At least I hope they don’t, except in that ghostly way that every character you encounter in a dream is supposedly an aspect of yourself.

It’s almost 2025. What, and who, are novels for? This was, oddly, a question I rarely asked about poems, because the answer seemed obvious: other poets. Poetry was a circular economy, which had built into it a transcendental appeal to a higher authority, civic or divine in nature. Percy Shelley knew this when he compared poets to “legislators, or prophets,” concluding, famously or notoriously, that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Unacknowledged does a lot of work in that sentence: it turns the presumably civic legislator into a prophet of quasi-divine truths—the sort of figure that, we are told, finds honor everywhere “but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (Mark 6:4). It’s a neat little dialectical trick, turning the civically and socially marginal figure of the poet into the cynosure of invisible eyes. The poet becomes, like Moses, legislator to a promised land he’ll never enter, that he must take on faith.

The game of poetry as I played it, starting in the Nineties, was to write for and in a coterie, while gesturing vaguely, Whitmanically, at some ineffable, transcendental X: implicitly divine in the scenic-confessional mode, implicitly civic in the game of Language poetry. (Occasionally some figure manages to unite these modes, though this happens more often outside the American context: Geoffrey Hill comes to mind). Either way, it was a game of quality rather than quantity.¹ Measuring one’s success in terms of readership or sales wasn’t just poor form, it was impossible, a transgression of the game itself. The material conditions of poetry were routinely obfuscated, but I chose more or less unthinkingly the seductive if not particularly easy path of academia as my means of support. Academic poets, I perceived, could have their cake and eat it too, enjoying a certain cultural prestige backed by the institutional credit of the institutions they studied and taught at and the magazines and presses they published in and edited, orthogonal to the demands of the literary marketplace. You could be at once culturally emplaced and countercultural, ideally placed as a critic of capitalism, provided you didn’t look too closely at the sources of your money, while looking down your nose at the few poets (Billy Collins, Mary Oliver) able to penetrate the marketplace and the consciousness of a mass readership.

The whole house of cards came crashing down as the twenty-first century accelerated, as academic jobs became scarcer and the prestige of STEM grew, and as our society seemed to collectively decide that “get that bag” was the only value worth cherishing. I was lucky; I’m a product of what in hindsight looks like the very last moment of prestige and prosperity for the sort of poet I was trained to be. Anecdotes are everywhere, but look for example at what’s become of the Jones Lecturers at Stanford, twenty-three undergraduate creative writing teachers unceremoniously fired this past August. There but for the grace of God go I: I was a Stegner Fellow in poetry back in 1999-2001, and if I hadn’t gotten into the PhD lit program at Cornell, I might have become a Jones Lecturer myself. Instead I got my PhD, enjoyed six idyllic years in Ithaca, and lucked into a job that probably wouldn’t have existed the year after I took it—2008, the year of the financial crash. Who knows how much longer it will last—will I make it to retirement? At any rate I am taking full advantage of the privilege of my position to write whatever I feel like writing. That still includes the occasional poem and the occasional poetry collection—in fact, I plan to bring one out next year. But it mostly nowadays means writing novels.

I never wanted to be a poet, really; it was just the mode of expression that came most readily to me, mostly because my mother wrote it and praised my first attempts. A poem is a mask that reveals you, a bulletproof vest full of holes; larvatus prodeo is every poet’s motto. Yet what I really wanted to be was a novelist! I could imagine no finer destiny than to be the author of the sorts of books in which, as a child and adolescent, I lived. Poems are mirrors, lamps, ropes and crampons, fundamentally handheld tools; novels are caverns, hollow earths, totalities that swallow your entire body. Or so, at least, were the novels I most loved, novels which transport the reader into a heightened world: Middle Earth, Narnia, Arrakis, the yellow wood of The Last Unicorn; but also Dickens’ London and Ray Bradbury’s Midwest and everybody’s New York City. The most ambitious novelists weren’t just world-builders; they seemed to be writing bibles, articles of faith. My parents were secular Jews who took us to a Unitarian church where God was never mentioned. I think I channeled my nascent religious impulses into reading fiction, and the desire to someday become one of the prophets who wrote it.

Those prophets made profits. I linger on the stupid pun because it’s the fulcrum of the divide between the practices of poetry and fiction as I’ve understood them. If poets are unacknowledged legislators or honorless prophets, novelists are the opposite: there is a market for what they write, opening into a potentially limitless frontier, unconfined by coterie. Novelists too may entertain notions of transcendence, but it’s a secondary urge. The building blocks of poems are words; the building blocks of novels are social facts. (Words of course are also social facts—the Language poets never let you forget that—but poems present them in atomized units to be synthesized on the level of the line; whereas novels synthesize words on the levels of the sentence, the paragraph, and the character.) The assemblage of social facts that constitutes a novel can be so absorbing, so alive, that transcendence is built into the form as a readerly experience. Poems may materialize transcendence in a memorable line, but mostly they just gesture at it, like Shelley’s skylark. But to read a good novel is to experience transcendence. That’s an experience people are ready to pay for.

At least they used to. When I was coming up in the Eighties and Nineties, novels and novelists still held a fairly exalted position in the culture; poets were more exotic specimens, faintly condescended to if they came to public notice at all. Viewed from this end of 2024, it seems pretty clear that novelists have come to occupy the same precarious cultural position that poets once did. Their crumbling confidence is immanent to the form; the decline of the social and systems novel and the rise of autofiction speaks to the diminished authority most novelists feel to address the totality, whether in the form of the “Great American novel” or in something more global. We can only feel authority, and a shaky authority at that, over ourselves and the people of our own class; thus the never-ending stream of novels by Brooklyn writers about writers from Brooklyn. This work isn’t necessarily bad or unreadable, but. I once took a television writing course, in which the instructor told us that in order to have any chance of being picked up, a TV pilot must speak deeply and widely to the American people. Who has that sort of ambition for novels now? Meanwhile the rise of “Instapoets” has refreshed the market for poetry—or, rather, for the parasocial relationship onto which poetry can glom—and honor, or at least the fleeting dopamine-driven attention that is social media’s coin of the realm, accrues to poets as a result.

Some novels are an awful lot like poems, in that they are driven by voice—driven in the propulsive sense. The sense of intimacy with another mind is paramount, which is what I loved about Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? But novels are also repositories of character. The classic novels give us memorable characters, styles of being, figures of the impulse to transcend straitened circumstances, who then suffer the consequences of such impulses. Isabel Archer, for example, struggles to transcend the limitations placed upon her as an upper-class American nineteenth-century woman, who has the material means for transcending her circumstances but is morally and imaginatively confined by a marriage plot. Dorothea Brooke is in much the same situation, though her quest is more overtly spiritualized and her arc more comic, though her story ends with the promised land of love just out of her reach. In these late Victorian works, character interiority is richly and beautifully balanced with the depiction of a social world that has the illusion of completeness—like Tolkien’s scholarship-encrusted Middle Earth—even though the most complex of novels inevitably simplify the terrains of both the interior and exterior life.

I’m proud of Beautiful Soul, dopey title and all. That book and How Long Is Now represent real and full attempts to synthesize my poetic and storytelling impulses, each in a different register imagining a kind of mythic, usable past for my parents, and thus myself. But I am not interested in crafting a self-image for others to consume. I don’t want to be a character, I want to create characters. I want to use the novel form to think with, about current events and eternal moral questions, while also being as entertaining as possible.

1. Though I have sometimes wondered at the differing approaches to literary production of these two modes; the Language poets were wildly prolific, whereas poets of the scenic-confessional variety seemed to pride themselves on slender volumes widely spaced by a margin of five years or more.